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Silent films, reel music

Michael Dwyer

DAYTIME television is hardly unexplored territory for the professional musician, but few bands can legitimately call it working. It's 10.30am in the Blue Grassy Knoll's Fitzroy bunker and the vibe is a weird blend of man cave downtime and hell-for-leather activity.

The band's de facto conductor, as ever, is long-deceased silent-movie star Buster Keaton. As he leaps over some oafish patsy's back on the TV, Gus Macmillan, Philip McLeod, Steph O'Hara and Mark Elton kick into a precision-timed klezmer piece on banjo, violin, accordion and upright bass, their eyes flicking between sheet music and black-and-white screen.

Percussionist Simon Barfoot has his own laptop monitor and fists full of toys resting on his kit. A sliding whistle shadows every move up and down the elevator shaft. Cymbal crashes mark tumbles, nails are knock-knock-knocked into place and an elevator bell goes ''ding'' at shrewdly judged intervals.

Arguably the pinnacle of the band's craft arrives courtesy of a rubber toy briefly deployed as our hero springs from a phone booth and through the legs of his moustachioed assailant. ''Brrdip-dip!'' it goes. Piece de resistance or what?

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''The thing with Simon's [sound effects],'' Macmillan says later, ''is that they're the last thing to go into the score after we've watched the movie 100 times, but they always get the most laughs.''

Comedy can be a fine art, but as Rik Mayall has often observed, you can't beat farting noises and falling over. It's a universal-language thing.

Indeed, the Blue Grassy Knoll have toured their original scores to Keaton's movies from Melbourne to Europe, the US, China and Brazil in the past 15 years. The first order of business this morning is a surprise invitation to play in Papua New Guinea. The motion is carried enthusiastically.

After so many years they seem to have the composition process pretty well coded. Parts are written by each member, sometimes edited and switched between scenes, and after a couple of runs through, Elevator looks done and dusted for the premiere performance of The Goat next weekend.

The 22-minute film from 1921 will be screened alongside three others from the same period: The Playhouse, Cops and One Week. Keaton wrote, directed and starred in 18 of these babies within two years, Macmillan says. The implication of unfathomable genius is hard to deny.

It was the banjo player's former girlfriend - a projectionist, as fate would have it - who suggested Keaton's works when the Knoll first thought to tackle the live soundtrack caper in the mid '90s.

Much has changed since they scored and toured his debut feature of 1923, Our Hospitality, lugging cans of 16-millimetre film around Australia with their instruments.

There's a special synergy where silent movies are concerned and Keaton's lend themselves to the Blue Grassy Knoll's art perfectly.

''We have looked at others and he just seems to be the most relevant and the most funny,'' Macmillan says. ''He hasn't dated. We've played them in China and we played them in Brazil and audiences have exactly the same response. It's actually more crazy in China because they're more into that slapstick kind of culture.''

One such performance led to the Knoll's most significant departure from script in 2007. After a Keaton gig in Beijing, they were invited to score Laborer's Love, one of the first short films produced in China in 1922. The band admits they felt a little out of their depth initially but the universal language was ultimately vindicated. ''We were a bit worried they were going to see us as being irreverent, but they totally got it. The film is fun and we were having fun.''

The Blue Grassy dream is to tour Keaton's highly accomplished American Civil War feature around the world with a serious roster of world-class philharmonic ensembles. Until then, they'll always have that night in rural Victoria when Barfoot brought a whoopie cushion to the gig.

''Simon tried to see how many fart jokes we could get in the film, so every 20 seconds somebody was farting,'' Macmillan says.

''We like to make each other laugh as well as the audience. That's another way we've managed to keep things fresh.''